relentlessly prune bullshit

Paul Graham, in an essay titled "Life is Short", makes the convincing case that life is indeed short. I encourage you to check out that essay before reading my post here, which discusses content found there.

In that essay, after establishing that life is short, Graham ends his essay with an exhortation for good living:

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.

Getting rid of as much bullshit as possible sounds like a fine idea. But, what exactly is bullshit? Graham offers some poignant words on what bullshit is.

When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word that pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer is somewhat tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit that it's the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does have a distinctive character. There's something fake about it. It's the junk food of experience. 
If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.

The representative examples Graham offers are uncontroversial enough: unnecessary meetings (because they're unnecessary), pointless disputes (because they're pointless), bureaucracy (because "cutting out the middleman" is a thing), etc. I won't dwell on these topics because I think it is clear enough to see where these activities become bullshitty. I turn instead to the last category Graham mentions in the passage above: the addictive but unrewarding pastimes.

My claim is that "addictive but unrewarding pastimes" is a very inclusive category that among other enticing ideas includes (1) study for the sake of study, (2) friendships that are not mutually beneficial, and (3) caring to the detriment of doing.

The aforementioned items are near-and-dear-to-the-heart bullshits of mine, so it is with a large dose of self-criticism that I make this argument. From my experience, these bullshits are trickier to identify as they may sometimes take the appearance virtues. This makes them especially dangerous.

Okay, no more bullshit, let's dive in!

Keep calm and study on


Probably around 10 or so years back, I came up with my own heuristic for pruning bullshit. It went something like this:

Suppose you want to do BLAH. Does BLAH contribute to one of your major goals? If yes, then go ahead. In not, is BLAH something enjoyable? If not, then do not do BLAH.

This way of thinking is, in most cases, better than just going with the flow and being completely passive. Not a very high bar, but let's start there. For example, suppose BLAH is starting a stamp collection. This does not really contribute to any of my major goals, nor is it something I find particularly enjoyable. So, I shouldn't start collecting stamps. Duh. But, maybe not so 'Duh!' if I have a friend that is asking me to start stamp collecting. So this heuristic does do something by offering a path away from things that are downright not enjoyable or not particularly useful in the face of circumstances like peer pressure.

However, it does little to align a person towards particular goals or ideals. In my personal experience, one big class of poor decisions I have made is to have some fuzzy goal (e.g. I want to speak many languages) and then work quite hard in many directions approaching said fuzzy goal. I would ask myself, "should I study some Hungarian now?" And, this would align with some general goal like the aforementioned "I want to speak many languages". Okay, go, study 30 minutes of Hungarian; sounds like a good use of time! Many learn! Much smart!

But really, is spending 30 minutes of Hungarian a good use of my time? Don't I have Chinese or Japanese to work on (similar class of 'thing', language to study). Or, might my time be better spent actually doing something, like building a business, writing a book, developing higher priority skills... etc.

Studying lots of languages, for all but the most talented professional polyglots, alas is an example of something that is an addictive but unrewarding pastime. It smells a lot like productivity because it involves things like concentration, discipline, trying new things. But, it is ultimately unrewarding relative to other things one may choose to spend time on.

Consider a high-fiber cookie. It's got a lot of good to it, including fiber. But really, there are many other things to eat with fiber that don't have the stuff in the cookie we want to avoid (e.g. refined sugar).

Study for the sake of study becomes bullshit when it begins impeding on other more important goals. Or, worse yet, if it impedes one from even making those goals. There are endless founts of "things to know", especially when it comes to culture(s). We can never know everything about every culture, let alone a single one. You physically cannot listen to every song every recorded. Nor can you watch every TV show. Yet it is easy to get caught up in minor, low (or no) priority goals. I gotta finish this show. I must read that next Wikipedia article. I need to...

No you don't! The price is too high.

In order for studying not to be bullshit, it must be clearly goal oriented. Those goals of course may change over time, but avoiding spelling out clearly what you are trying to accomplish makes time 'studying' little better (and often less fun) than passive slacking off. Likewise, a solution to the problem of ensuring you do exploratory learning is to set aside a reasonable time/place to do that, but not let these tentative probings detract from your main projects (unless of course, you re-prioritize the side gig to become the main gig).

Friendsies :)


"Spending time with people" can refer to both good uses and not so good uses of time. For those that truly fit the category of loved ones time spent together is very likely time well spent (i.e. not bullshit). But, oftentimes people that fit into the nominal category of loved ones such as family members and friends are the ones that add the most bullshit to our lives.

Bullshit can be manipulative. It may make subtly threats like, "spend time with me, or feel guilty for being a bad ROLE" (where ROLE can be something like friend, partner, son/daughter, etc.). Such threats can often be diffused with some careful, thinking. This blog is optional reading 😛. You may close the tab/window if its not worth your time. Do the people we say care about us give this same option?

Additionally, bullshit may be addictive in a similar sense to how substances can be. We may get some cheap feels out of being with certain people (e.g. enjoying some flattery, being the best looking in a group of people, etc.). Do these relations ultimately prove rewarding? If not, you may be smelling bullshit.

Bullshit mixed in with relationships with people that we think are important to us (who very well may be important to us) is tricky to identify because it often isn't an obviously losing deal. Likewise, nostalgia, loyalty, compassion, and other forces (some which are virtues, others which are not) may hold a powerful sway over us, begging us to refrain from trying to assume a more objective viewpoint, even if just for a little while.

This is not a call to cut out bullshitters from our lives, but rather to recognize when we ourselves and the people around us are bullshitters and to steer the relationships we have away from bullshit. Constructively, we should try to make the relationships we decide to continue mutually beneficial. Time spent together should be time well spent for all parties involved. For those that are beyond reform, well then it may be time to move on... ...but for those that we can work with, identifying public enemy number one as Bullshitty McBullshit may be a good way towards building better relationships with. Cutting out bullshit is rewarding.

A final tangentially related point—we may have good, dependable friends we don't actually spend that much time talking to. Likewise, we may have acquaintances that manage to take up lots and lots of our time. Part of this, I think, is mutual respect. When we are respectful of other people's time, we want to enjoy time spent together. But, we also don't want to prolong things to each other's detriment. We want to spend an appropriate amount of time together, and that will differ by the roles we play in each other's lives. Some people live their lives with much more 'disposable' time than others. Let's not throw away other people's time with our own.

Care to do nothing?


A related species of bullshit to studying for the sake of studying and continuing to spend time with 'friends' for the sake of friendship is caring in a very abstract sort of way.

c.f. virtue signalling

When our 'caring' doesn't lead to much action at all, it is time to examine if we are bullshitting.

Bullshit discovery methods

Now, I turn to the positive project of describing what I am trying out to build a bullshit detector, and consequently spend my time better:



Comments/questions are welcome; I hope we can all work towards spending our time wisely each day. 




Labels: ,